Sovereign AI is no longer a policy paper. It is a factory in Dublin and a retired NSA director in Tokyo

The factory

Armada and Johnson Controls have opened Galleon Forge Two in Dublin, marking the start of continuous production of sovereign AI infrastructure in Europe. The facility is the second of its kind, following the Gilbert, Arizona site, and the companies say they aim to reach 500 MW of capacity by 2027. The Dublin plant spans 90,000 square feet, is supported by approximately 700 Johnson Controls workers, and its first unit — a Leviathan modular data center — is already headed to Fossefall in Norway. The Galleon Forge model is designed to be replicated in any region to provide localized control over AI infrastructure, and Armada says it plans manufacturing expansion at a Johnson Controls site in Edmonton, Canada. m:…6597

The Norwegian order gives the factory a concrete shape: Fossefall placed an order for five Leviathan modular data centers totaling more than 9 MW, with delivery of all five scheduled by the first quarter of 2027. Leviathan supports high-density compute with zero-water cooling technologies. The point of building data centers in a factory, rather than assembling them on site, is speed and repeatability — and the point of building them in Dublin is that a European customer can buy European-built infrastructure without waiting for a hyperscaler to schedule a region. m:…6597

The people and the programmes

In Tokyo, Sakana AI has appointed former NSA Director Admiral Michael Rogers and former CIA Chief of Station Tom Moran as Senior Advisors, to advise on strengthening the defense sector and enhancing cybersecurity. Rogers served as Director of the NSA and Commander of U.S. Cyber Command from 2014 to 2018; Moran served six times as Chief of Station, in East Asia, Western Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The move follows Sakana's recruitment of Dr. Jürgen Schmidhuber in September, and the company says it is actively expanding its Tokyo team to support Japan's defense sector. A research lab hiring two of the most senior intelligence officials of the last decade is not a branding exercise. It is a bid for defense work. m:…4283

In the UK, Cosine has joined the Leonardo SME Collaboration Programme, created with Form1 Partners, to integrate its sovereign AI capabilities into UK defence and national security infrastructure. The programme connects UK defence and security SMEs with Leonardo's engineering expertise and focuses on long-term relationships rather than short-term acceleration. Cosine says its models can operate within fully disconnected and air-gapped infrastructure, that it was selected for the UK Government's Sovereign AI programme, and that it uses Isambard-AI — the UK's largest supercomputer — as compute. The pattern is the same in both countries: the state wants frontier capability inside its own walls, and it is buying from the labs willing to live there. m:…5303

The plumbing underneath

The fourth piece of the week is less visible but just as telling. Nebul, a European AI-native cloud provider, has become the first neocloud to adopt NetApp Novus, a high-performance storage architecture designed for large-scale AI infrastructure. NetApp says Novus is architected for up to 100 TB per second of aggregate throughput, and uses a disaggregated architecture to scale performance, capacity, and concurrency independently. The integration is meant to let Nebul extend existing data estates into sovereign cloud environments while maintaining consistent security and governance. m:…2945

Sovereign AI, taken together, is now three things at once: factories that build data centers like products, labs that hire for defense credibility, and storage architectures built for data that cannot leave the country. The through-line is control — over where the compute sits, who can see the weights, and which government can audit the system. That is a procurement decision now, not a policy debate, and this week's announcements are the receipts. m:…2945 m:…6597